Photographer Peter Menzel has gathered an amazing visual documentation on eating habits around the world; each photo represents the food eaten in a week by the people in the photo (which implies that it is the number of people who live in the same household, even it that “house” is a cardboard box or a tin shack…). It’s eye-opening in many ways: The amount of junk food in any one of the American households outweighs nearly the entire weekly diet of a family in Chad; some cultures are starch-oriented (pastas, breads, potatoes), and others are meat-oriented. Click on the photo below to see a video compilation, with the countries labeled, of who eats what.

What do you eat in a week? How much is natural, how much is man-made? How much water and natural drinks (teas, fruit juices) vs. artificial drinks (sodas, syrups) do you drink in a week? Just curious…!

2 responses to “What We Eat”

wow. this is eye-opening. since we’ve moved to europe, we eat SO much better than we did in the states…without even trying. I drink green tea instead of coffee all day, we dont have junk food because its just not as convenient and dont get me started on the meats and veggies!

It probably isn’t hard to do, to have a better diet than the States! 😉 But it also depends on where you are in Europe; Swiss tend to eat quite healthily, but in the UK fish and chips are common, cheap, and not the most healthy thing – but VERY tasty! What I find most eye-opening about this series of photos is the amounts of packaged, processed, or sugary foods in western countries as compared with everywhere else in the world…